(Above) Vic Gostin holds a specimen of the Acraman ejecta from the Flinders Ranges, at the University of Adelaide.

The Study

Podcast Nos. 16 & 17: Interview with Vic & Olga Gostin

by Craig Robertson

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(Above) Olga and Vic Gostin relax with some Lake Eyre granites on a recent trip.

Vic Gostin is a geologist and Olga Gostin an anthropologist, both having specialities explored in a wide-ranging interview to be reproduced here in two podcasts. They both have Russian family backgrounds. After extraordinary childhoods - Vic in war-time Shanghai, Olga in apartheid South Africa - they have both had highly productive careers in teaching and research and have written books and papers about their work (see the bibliography below). They live in Adelaide where they have a son and a daughter and two grandchildren.

Vic was educated at Melbourne High School and the University of Melbourne where he did his masters degree in stratigraphy. He is interested in the way geology brings all the sciences together, in particular where both astronomy and geology have the concept of 'deep time' at their core and give us a correspondingly deep perspective on the world and its structure. He has specialised in sedimentology and planetology, studying the effects of climate on patterns of sedimentation, especially those derived from ancient glaciations, modern cool-water shelf carbonates and lacustrine environments. His fieldwork resulted in the discovery of ejecta from the Lake Acraman impact site deposited in widespread areas of South Australia, notably in the Flinders Ranges. He was honoured by having an asteroid named for him (3640 GOSTIN). The geology, and lately the palaeontology of his discovery, is stimulating some interesting new lines of research into the origin of multi-cellular life on earth. Vic was also responsible for introducing a successful environmental geology course to the University of Adelaide where he served as Head of the Geology & Geophysics Department. Teaching at undergraduate and post-graduate levels - public education in earth sciences generally - has been a life-long commitment. For these achievements he was awarded the Bruce Webb Medal 2011 by the Geological Society of Australia (South Australia Branch).

In my study Nos. 16 & 17No. 16 Reflections on Ice: notes on exploring old Gondwana - Part 1: Antarctica; the silence; not settled; Mars (2.8 Mb mp3 file; 6' 04").No. 17 Reflections on Ice: notes on exploring old Gondwana - Part 2: Nothofagus forests; the imaginative landscape (2.2 Mb mp3 file; 4' 50").
(Note: For reasons of time IMS notes were left aside in the two Gostin podcasts. They are posted for here download and in the RSS feeds. For more IMS Notes see also List of Subjects.)

Vic & Olga Gostin: selected publications

V. A. Gostin (ed.) 2001 Gondwana to Greenhouse: Australian Environtmental Science. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 21.
Olga Gostin 1993, 1995 Accessing the Dreaming: Heritage, Conservation and Tourism at Mungo National Park. Aboriginal Research Institute Publications, Faculty of Aboriginal and Islander Studies, University of South Australia, Underdale, SA 5032.
Olga Gostin 1986 Cash cropping, Catholicism and change: resettlement among the Kuni of Papua. National Centre for Development Studies, Pacific research monograph No. 14, Australian National University, Canberra.
See also: Ngitji Ngitji/Mona Tur 2010 Cicada Dreaming; the author acknowledges Olga's role in producing this book.

Both Vic and Olga Gostin have published papers and articles over many years. In particular Vic's research has resulted in many papers in refereed journals; a brief list relating mainly to the Acraman ejecta work follows:

Victor Gostin, David McKirdy and George Williams. Ice, an Asteroid Impact & the Rise of Complex Life. Australasian ScienceVol. 32(4) May 2011: 34-36.